to account for yesterday’s sales and refill their pans with the supplies they’d be selling. She unlocked the stall’s back door, which led to her small storeroom and the deep freezer inside. She switched on the generator.
The power supply had been out for two straight half days, but the cakes of frosty ice in the freezer had kept the water cold enough. The same couldn’t be said for the ice cream and frozen yogurt. She felt the plastic sachets of FanIce and FanYogo mixed in with the small water packets and frowned at their mushiness.
As Muni walked away, she noticed a plastic soap bottle on the floor. Instead of the syrupy green Fairy liquid the label advertised, there was a watery yellow solution inside. It was too pale to be urine, she decided, tentatively raising it to her nose. The pungent odor of ammonia and lemons induced her gag reflex. This was the scent that had greeted her when she opened her stall. She recognized it now as the cleaning fluid the market butchers used to disinfect meat, and the oddly pleasing fragrance that clung to Ibrahim. She arched her eyeliner-traced eyebrows and blinked away tears as she jumped to conclusions. Of course Ibrahim would want to be with someone his own age, she told herself. Aside from the way she smelled, Asana was a pretty girl.
“Auntie Muni?” The little girl who had been sweeping interrupted her thoughts.
“Yes, my dear?” She put the bottle down, covering her hurt with a smile.
“I have removed the buckets.”
But what if it was Mr. Selifu? Muni asked herself, blooming with hope that Asana’s visitor had been Ibrahim’s boss instead. Resolving to ask Asana point-blank if she had broken their agreement by bringing a man into her stall, Muni dug in her bag and gave the girl the five-pesewa coin she was angling for. She followed the child out to see if Asana or any of her other kayayei were coming. The market would be open in twenty minutes.
Morning light was diluting the sky, and now, as far down the row as Muni could see, small girls were sweeping. The sound of the dried-reed brooms swiping rock-studded earth and cement was almost orchestral, accompanied by the creaks of traders dragging wood tables and benches into arrangement, and shopkeepers freeing heavy metal doors from their locks. The shrill of a loudspeaker suddenly disrupted this market symphony—a prelude to the more guttural beats of transaction that would come when the shops opened.
“Testing,” a man’s voice announced, his breath heavy in the distant microphone. “Munhwɛ TV test.”
Muni pulled her handbag open to retrieve the Munhwɛ flyer. A sinewy young man with a dimpled grin had pressed it into her hand yesterday, on her way to the fifty-pesewa toilets.
“There’s still time to enter, madam,” he had said.
She looked up at him, noting his Munhwɛ TV T-shirt.
“Am I your size?” she flirted, reading the title of the show.
“Fat-ulous,” he answered.
Muni had giggled at his unblinking recitation of Ahmed Razak’s catchphrase.
“You should enter and try for the car.”
She winked at him. “I have cars already.”
The Munhwɛ boy had reminded her of Ibrahim, rangy and brimming with the muscular energy of youth. Now, she tucked the flyer back in her bag, feeling fresh pain at the prospect of her lover having been in her stall, with Asana.
* * *
“My guy never show?”
Ken shook his head at his supervisor.
“Those Mal’ Atta girls have Charles under a spell. What kind of chook go for four hours?” Sergeant Duah joked about Charles’s longer-than-usual absence.
The two men were moving the pair of metal barricades that made up their checkpoint on the neighborhood border between Tesano and Abeka. They leaned them against a tree off the road along with the plastic chairs they—really Ken—had been keeping watch in all night.
Ken suppressed a growl. He didn’t care what kind of sex Charles was having, or why he was traveling twenty minutes by road to have it when there were girls much closer to home. He was sick of doing Charles’s job and Sergeant Duah’s too.
Both men exploited Ken’s freshman rank, one of them usually disappearing for hours from whatever checkpoint they were assigned, or cutting him out of whatever “something small” they coaxed from midnight drivers.
How he longed to report them. But he knew retaliation would be swift. The old guard viewed any attempt at reform by younger officers as a “breach of discipline.”
There were forty-four breaches listed in the Ghana Police Service handbook, but only two were consistently punished. The first: “Disobedience of a lawful order given him by his senior in rank, whether verbally or in writing, or by authorized signal on parade.” The second: “Communicating to any unauthorized person matters connected with the Service without permission from the Senior Police Officer under whom he serves.”
Ken was not so naive that he hadn’t expected some form of hazing on the job. His uncle, now a chief inspector, had prepared him with tales of his first-year constable days. But even if he hadn’t, Ken knew his people. Ghanaians acquired power three ways: money, position, and age. And when they had it, they wielded it with a hammer’s blunt force.
Fitting his helmet over his head, he seated himself behind Duah on the senior officer’s motorcycle. Taking advantage of the relatively open, pre–rush hour Nsawam Road, Duah zipped to their Munhwɛ assignment at Mal’ Atta Market.
When they arrived, Duah stayed on the bike. “I’m coming, eh.”
With gritted teeth, Ken watched Duah rev away, reminding himself that when the new class of academy graduates entered, he would move up a rung. He had received high commendations from his senior officers, and his uncle was friendly with the inspector general of police. He had hope that he would be considered for early promotion. Advancing from constable to lance corporal would mean a little more power and a little less abuse.
He yawned, wiping away a tear of exhaustion as he strode past the sign announcing Mallam Atta Market. Located in Kokomlemle, the central Accra neighborhood built in the early 1950s to accommodate the city’s population spike, Mal’ Atta served 1,800 customers daily, including workers in the now mostly commercial district and residents in neighboring New Town. From fresh vegetables to hair-braiding services, one could find almost anything among the stalls and stands spread across the market’s 57,499 square yards. Stepping over a slim gutter, Ken braced himself as he passed through the entry partition between Mal’ Atta’s cement walls.
When Ken was a child, his mother sold cloth in Kumasi’s Kejetia market. Growing up, he’d felt claustrophobic in the stadium-size crush laureled as West Africa’s largest open-air bazaar. His childhood had been populated by men wielding crates and sacks filled with everything from water sachets to ground millet, and women stationed behind tables topped with pyramids of tomatoes, student math sets, or pans brimming with all manner of powdered condiments—all incessantly haggling.
When he reached his teens, and his mother made him roam the market for customers, balancing folded fabric stacks on his head, his aversion to market hustle hardened. He couldn’t remember a happier day than when his uncle offered to pay his way through the police academy. Now, as he followed the traffic ambling toward the blaring Munhwɛ TV speakers, he resented his first-year rank all the more.
Mal’ Atta attacked with a slew of sensory assaults. While the morning sun overexposed Vodafone-red and MTN-yellow umbrellas, massive wooden sheds roofed with corrugated-iron sheets made shadowy figures of those transacting inside. Between the sheds and umbrellas, the narrow paths were choked. Suppliers squeezed through, carting boxes or plastic containers. Preachers outfitted with microphones and portable speakers admonished anyone within earshot. Itinerant chickens avoided children free from their caretakers’ backs who were chasing each other in dusty circles, urinating, or shitting within spitting distance of guardians skinning oranges or hacking sugarcane stalks. Patrons punctuated the chaos,